About the Book

Christianity is one of the fastest growing religions in China. Despite its long history in China and its significant indigenization or intertwinement with Chinese society and culture, Christianity continues to generate suspicion among political elites and intense debates among broader communities within China.

This unique book applies socio-cultural methods in the study of contemporary Christianity. Through a wide range of empirical analyses of the complex and highly diverse experience of Christianity in contemporary China, it examines the fraught processes by which various forms and practices of Christianity interact with the Chinese social, political and cultural spheres. Contributions by top scholars in the field are structured in the following sections: Enchantment, Nation and History, Civil Society, and Negotiating Boundaries.

This book offers a major contribution to the field and provides a timely, wide-ranging assessment of Christianity in Contemporary China.

Table of Contents

Introduction Francis Khek Gee Lim Part 1: Enchantment 1. Signs and wonders: Christianity and hybrid modernity in China Richard Madsen 2. From ‘Christianity in China’ to ‘Chinese Christianity’: changing paradigms and changing perspectives Peter Tze Ming Ng Part 2: Nation and History 3. Christian Revival from Within: Seventh-day Adventism in China Joseph Tse-Hei Lee and Christie Chui-Shan Chow 4. Protestant reactions to the nationalism agenda in contemporary China Carsten Vala 5. Trying to make sense of history: Chinese Christian traditions of countercultural belief and their theological and political interpretation of past and present history Tobias Brandner 6. Contemporary Christianity and the Religiosity of Popular Chinese Cinema Yam Chi-Keung 7. ‘To the Peoples’: Christianity and ethnicity in China’s minority areas Francis Khek Gee Lim Part 3: Civil Society 8. Civil society and the role of the Catholic Church in contemporary China Chan Shun-hing 9. The emergence of Christian subcultures in China: beginnings of an inculturation from the grassroots? Katrin Fiedler 10. Calvin, culture and Christ? Developments of faith among Chinese intellectuals Fredrik Fällman 11. Christian ethics and business life: an ethnographic account of overseas Chinese Christian entrepreneurs in China’s economic transition Joy Tong 12. Saints, secrets, and salvation: emergence of spiritual–religious groups in China between 1978 and 1989 Kristin Kupfer Part 4: Negotiating Boundaries 13. The house-church identity and preservation of Pentecostal-style Protestantism in China Kao Chen-yang 14. Making sense of China’s state-society relations: unregistered Protestant churches in the reform era Teresa Wright and Teresa Zimmerman-Liu 15. A Three-Self Protestant church, the local state and religious policy implementation in a coastal Chinese city Mark McLeister 16. Constructing sacred space under the forces of the market: a study of an "upper-floor" Protestant church in Hong Kong Gustav K. K. Yeung

About the Editor

Francis Khek Gee Lim teaches in the Division of Sociology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His publications include Imagining the Good Life: NegotiatingCulture and Development in Nepal Himalaya;Mediating Piety: Technology and Religion in contemporary Asia (editor) and Christianity and the State in Asia (co-editor).